Inspired by medical imaging processes, Marilène Oliver conceived a series of printed portraits that combine print and sculpture. At her MA Degree show at the Royal College of Art in 2001, she exhibited the first of these, I Know You Inside Out. This was a reconstruction of a 39-year old convicted murderer, Joseph Paul Jernigan (known to the medical world as the US National Library of Medicine's Visible Human); prior to his execution, Jernigan was persuaded to donate his body to medical science. After his death, his body was frozen, and sliced into 1871 cryosections which were photographed and uploaded onto the internet in 1994. Oliver selectively downloaded these images and 'reconstructed' him, by screenprinting these sections onto sheets of acrylic and stacking them, at 2 cm intervals. The result is a print in three dimensions; viewed at certain angles the body appears as a solid entity, but viewed at eye-level it dematerialises. The clinical abstraction of medical imagery is reconfigured to evoke an ethereal presence.

Using MRI (medical resonance imaging) scans Oliver created a group portrait of her family - mother, father, self and sister - in the same fashion. The figures are nebulous, immaterial, held in suspension between the real and the virtual, the solid and the illusory. By printing with bronze ink, Oliver makes a deliberate reference to the weighty solidity of conventional sculpture, but subverts the allusion by employing it in the creation of images which play off opaque against translucent, and fluctuate between solid and insubstantial. In adapting scientific modes of picturing the body, and in the structure of the work she also draws on the visual tropes of science fiction - the processes of suspended animation and the dematerialisation and reintegration of bodies through teleportation.